Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Is your head right, Bird Alighting? Or is your thinking gone far away?” asked Arrowhead. “What do you mean—blood will always follow blood?”

  In a stronger voice, he said, “Now is the time we must join the rest of Looking Glass’s people and go in search of the others who are fighting these Shadows and soldiers.”

  SECOND Lieutenant Sevier M. Rains had done an admirable job plundering the village … even if he did say so himself. His father had ransacked Seminole villages in Florida, Mexican towns far south of the border, then struggled in a lost cause against Federal troops during the Civil War. He would approve of the way the lieutenant and his men left nothing of any value for the Nez Perce.

  “Lieutenant!” Captain Whipple called out as he approached with Captain Winters.

  “Sir!” and Rains snapped a salute as the officers’ eyes raked over the destruction he had made of Looking Glass’s camp.

  Whipple asked, “Are you far from completing your assignment?”

  “We are all but finished, Captain.”

  “Good,” Winters said. “We’re about to move out.”

  “Where to, sirs?” Rains inquired.

  “Back toward Mount Idaho,” Whipple explained. “We’re going to give more than six hundred horses to the volunteers, hoping to keep them out of the hands of the hostiles. Then we’ll rejoin our column across the Salmon.”

  Winters added, “General Howard should have the command across the river by now.”

  “So we’re going to join in the pursuit?” Rains asked after he had given the command for his detail to mount up.

  “This bunch won’t cause any more trouble, I’d wager,” Winters snorted.

  Whipple agreed as he gestured for them to move out, starting upstream. “With what little we’re leaving behind for his band, we’ve taken Looking Glass entirely out of the equation for the rest of the war, gentlemen.”

  Rains still felt the hot giddiness that had come from the brief fight forcing their way into the enemy camp. “I sure hope we’re not done, sirs.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Rains?” Whipple asked.

  “I only hope the general will leave some warriors for us,” Rains admitted. “I pray we’re not too late to get in on a little more fighting before this shabby, second-rate war is over.”

  AFTER sending a courier upriver to remind Captain Joel G. Trimble to hurry across the Salmon and rejoin the column, General O. O. Howard could now begin his tortuous pursuit of the Non-Treaty bands as the warriors and their families slipped away into the wrinkles of that rugged terrain rising steeply between the Salmon and Snake Rivers.

  Back on their first night in Camp Theller at Horseshoe Bend in the Salmon, William Hunter and more than forty of his volunteers had arrived in camp. They had announced they were from Dayton, in Washington Territory—a small town midway between Lewiston and Walla Walla—come to help the general put down the uprising in any fashion they could. Howard had put them to work early the next morning, 29 June. Hunter himself and a pair of his civilians willingly stripped off their clothes, dragged the saddles from their horses, then braved the icy-cold, roiling torrent of the Salmon as they dragged two lengths of thick rope and their pulleys to the west bank. Reaching the far side, they dismounted to the raucous cheers of Howard’s hundreds. With three rowboats acquired from settlers living upstream, the long column could now begin its crossing and its pursuit of Joseph’s Non-Treaty bands, one boatload of soldiers at a time.

  The goal was to attach a boat to the main cable by means of a loop sling, muscling each small load back and forth with the muscles of their backs pitted against the strength of the Salmon. But the ropes Hunter’s men lashed to a trio of stout, stately cottonwoods did not last out the day’s battering and buffeting as Howard started his command across. What with the strength of a snow-swollen current, the hemp lines finally gave out early in the afternoon, and one of the hastily constructed rafts started spinning downriver with its terrified crew. Almost a mile down the Salmon, they managed to beach their unwieldy craft and step onto solid ground.

  The following day, 30 June, the soldiers attempted something stronger in the way of a wire cable, hoping it would prove stronger than the rope … but it, too, ultimately failed against the racing current. With less than half the men having reached the west bank, most still on the east side with the general, this second day ended in even more frustration for Howard.

  Contrary to those who would eventually claim that he was overpious and refused to march on Sundays, O. O. Howard himself crossed the Salmon on the afternoon of 1 July after holding a small prayer service for his officers and what enlisted men chose to attend. It was a miserable day, raining and snowing alternately, as the general followed William Hunter and four of his men into the Salmon River breaks—where they nonetheless did find half a thousand Nez Perce ponies they managed to herd back to the crossing and forced across the river. Those animals that did not drown in the turbulent waters were turned over to Lieutenant James A. Haughey and his H Company of the Twenty-first Infantry, called up from Fort Vancouver. While the rest of the command had boated to the west side of the river, Haughey’s detail remained on the east bank to guard Howard’s supply depot.

  It was no small victory, therefore, that by sundown of 1 July the general had removed 500 ponies from his enemy and his entire column was finally across the frothy Salmon—in addition to their pack train, ammunition and supplies, artillery pieces, and other assorted impedimenta. An intermittent rain continued to fall, swelling the river at their backs, turning the green hills around them into a slick, soggy quagmire.

  With no time to celebrate their victory over the Salmon, Howard’s column now had to face another, and perhaps even more daunting, ordeal.

  For the three days before he had reached Horseshoe Bend with his command, it had rained off and on. But once they were in Camp Theller beside the Salmon, the skies were gutted and it began to pour almost nonstop, a storm that lasted three more days and nights while the soldiers struggled to get their animals and materiel across the Salmon. What part of the trail hadn’t been turned into a sticky morass had become so slick that even the surefooted mules were having difficulty maintaining their grip on the mushy hillsides.

  The packers who handled those mules hadn’t hired on to accept army scrip or paper greenbacks in exchange for their ordeal. Instead, the civilians were to be paid the going rate of one dollar per animal, per day, in “coin,” or what those grizzled frontiersmen called hard money. But that was just for the use, and steady abuse, of their animals. The packers themselves were paid even more. Howard had engaged ten of the best mule-skinners in the country at eighty-five dollars in coin per month and another forty-eight packers for sixty-five dollars in hard money.

  But securing enough money for their pay was the least of Howard’s problems. He had other, niggling details that bellowed for his attention. For one thing, his quartermasters had assured themselves that all their supply wagons had the proper number of wheels before setting out from Fort Lapwai. A shipment of dead-axle (or springless) wagons was brought upriver from Portland by the Oregon Steam Navigation Company. Problem was, the riverboat company hadn’t brought wagons up with two front wheels and two rear wheels! Then, too, much of the harness supplied Howard’s teamsters was already dried and rotten as unscrupulous traders attempted to make their quick money off this brief action against the Nez Perce.

  But when he got a wagon with the correct complement of wheels and hitched up the teams with usable, field-worthy harness … Howard found he still wasn’t able to hire enough teamsters from the surrounding countryside. Most of the low-end laboring classes in the Idaho towns were already attached to the column to help as road-building crews, who were paid a skimpy daily wage and found. Still, many of the teamsters he was able to hire out of the towns ended up quitting once the army crossed the Salmon and the going toughened far beyond what any of them had bargained for.

  Most of the hangers-on, those so-called volunteers,
with their leaders brandishing honorary titles, had already become an inconstant irritation to the general as well. The first bunch, twenty-one citizens from Walla Walla under Tom Page who had accompanied Howard to the battlefield days ago, ended up quitting and turning around for home, citing “pressing business,” before Howard even had his column across the Salmon! Fortunate for the general and his campaign, that very same day William Hunter and his forty men had showed up from Dayton.

  But a third cadre of some twenty-five citizens under “Captain” J. W. Elliott were a different color of horse altogether. They had reported in, then promptly rode off, creating more of a nuisance of themselves in the area than they were assisting the army in putting down this rebellion. That band of volunteers from Pomeroy, a small community some twenty-five miles east of Dayton in Washington Territory, had disgusted Howard in that they were far more interested in rustling any local settler’s loose stock than in pursuing the Non-Treaty Nez Perce.

  And it wasn’t only the civilians in this area who seemed to be securely resting at the bottom of the proverbial barrel. Major General Irwin McDowell, commander of the Division of the Pacific and Howard’s superior, was scraping the bottom of his own barrel when he ordered C Company of the Twelfth Infantry up from Fort Yuma in Arizona, including its own junior officer, Second Lieutenant Guy Howard—the general’s oldest son. Upon his arrival, Otis would make Guy one of his aides for the duration of the Nez Perce conflict. In addition, McDowell ordered up the Eighth Infantry’s H Company, then in California. By the time those two outfits reached San Francisco by train, McDowell had added companies C and L from the Fourth Artillery. Altogether, that was a complement of ninety-six unproven, untested soldiers and ten officers. Together with thirty-two green recruits fresh from their enlistment depots back east, all were loaded onto a steamer and sent north to Portland. They reached Lewiston on 19 June, the quickest deployment for any troop shipment then under way.

  All the delays and those men pouring in from around the country reminded O. O. Howard of that most unholy of holdovers from their days fighting the Civil War when the highest echelons of the Union command refused to budge, much less engage the Confederates, until they were assured of superior numbers and thereby certain of victory even before they marched into battle.

  In order to track the Non-Treaty bands, Howard realized he needed a complement of trustworthy scouts. While it was not near the number Howard had requested, McDowell nonetheless authorized the hiring of twenty-five Indian trackers. Later, on the fifth of July, Howard would be instructed that he could hire a total of eighty in all—some of which came from Fort Hall on the Bannock-Shoshone Reservation, a number of those having seen service in the previous year’s campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne on the Northern Plains. With his supply line assured, his manpower being hustled to the front, and competent guides mustered to keep him on the Nez Perce’s trail, Howard felt assured of putting an early end to this outbreak.

  Still, the delays and lack of rapid progress had been frustrating to the old soldier.

  The fleeing bands had chosen well when they crossed into this forbidding landscape of a rugged and lofty terrain squeezed up between the two deep, precipitous, and all-but-inaccessible canyons of the Salmon and Snake Rivers, just south of the point where the Salmon angled west in its quest to join the Snake. Atop the ridges lay a broken undulating prairie, while the only route to that plateau forced a horseman up the steep walls of the Salmon River gorge. Those slopes were a mixture of grassy prairie dotted with patches of evergreen timber.*

  Because the column was taxed in its climb to ever-higher altitudes, the excruciating exertion on man and animal began to show. While every soldier had his own complaints, the artillerymen grumbled the loudest. After Captain Charles B. Throckmorton, commander of the artillery battalion, had shown himself to be a laggard by the time they reached the Salmon, Howard had replaced him with Captain Marcus P. Miller. After only two days the fact that the artillerymen were unused to Indian campaigning was painfully apparent. Miller’s four gun crews let it be known what a toll it was taking on them as they struggled to keep up with the cavalry and infantry companies.

  It wasn’t that Howard’s scouts had trouble finding and following the Non-Treaty bands—what with Joseph’s people cutting a wide, telltale swath as more than seven hundred people drove along more than two thousand horses, many dragging travois. But at times the command reached a short stretch of that well-marked trail where the passage proved so slippery, the footing so treacherous, that a few of the pack animals slid right over the edge, tumbling down and down until some trees or jagged rocks put an end to their descent hundreds of yards below. By the time packers scrambled back down to see what they could salvage, there wasn’t much left of either the loose-footed mules or what supplies the animals had been carrying.

  Able to advance rarely more than ten, perhaps as much as twelve, miles per day, Howard cajoled, begged, and snapped at his column to keep them after their prey. Meanwhile, his scouts could only prod the soldiers with the distressing news that the Non-Treaty bands were staying far, far in the lead.

  No surprise, it continued to rain as they struggled toward the summit of Brown’s Mountain. But as they made that grueling 3,500-foot ascent, the rain turned to snow. Just below the summit, the entire command had to halt and hunker down as the wind came up, the clouds pressed down, and they were battered by a freezing sleet that soaked every man, caked every animal, in layers of bone-chilling ice. During the storm that night, the cooks attempted to prepare a dish made from abandoned and broken-down Nez Perce horses, which, among the officers, was laughingly called fricandeau de cheval Most claimed it tasted like a stringy beef, so the majority opted for their ration of salt pork as they hunkered around their blazing fires, the wind howling through what some now labeled Camp Misery.

  By the time Howard reached the summit, he had convinced himself that Joseph’s people had split into two bands. To meet the threat posed by the one group he was certain was inching its way south to unite with the dissident Shoshone and Bannock tribes along the Weiser River, the general had already ordered that troops under Major John Wesley Green march north from Fort Boise to the seat of the Indian war—thereby trapping the Nez Perce between them.

  But what of the other, larger group?

  Otis believed they still marched in front of him—that he could follow them until he caught them in camp, immediately surround them, and force a surrender. He became even more certain of this scenario when his Nez Perce scouts located one cache after another, each containing some of what the Non-Treaty warriors had stolen from the homes of the Salmon River and Camas Prairie settlers: cigars and clothing, flour and meerschaum pipes, along with other sundry supplies. The afternoon of their third day west of the Salmon, the advance even ran onto more than five hundred horses that had evidently strayed off from the Nez Perce herd.

  Destroying the cached supplies and ordering the horses driven back across the river, Howard convinced himself that all this circumstantial evidence indicated that Joseph was leading his people back toward the Wallowa and Imnaha valleys—the chief’s traditional camping grounds.

  While his officers grumbled among themselves, while the bone-weary, soaked-clear-through soldiers glared at their commander, Oliver Otis Howard steadfastly assured himself that he was about to bring the war to an end. Joseph was taking his bands back to their ancestral homes, where they would be trapped between two converging armies. It was only a matter of time now, Howard vowed. A few more days and a few more miles.

  This damnable little war was almost over.

  *Much of this area crossed by both the Nez Perce and Howard’s army in 1877 is today known as the Joseph Plains.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  JULY 2, 1877

  “I CAN’T ORDER YOU TO STAY ON THIS SIDE OF THE RIVER, Mr. Hunter,” General O. O. Howard had told the civilian leader from Dayton back on that first day the soldiers were attempting their perilous crossing. “Nor can I guarant
ee your safety if you go wandering off alone on the other side of the Salmon.”

  “You still have your mind set against sending any of your friendlies out to find the war camp, General?” asked William Hunter.

  “Not until I have enough of my men across should we have any more displays from the warriors like we had here day before yesterday.”

  “Mind you, me and my men don’t aim to get ourselves in any trouble, General Howard,” the civilian had assured him. “Just want to see where those Nez Perce have run off to. We figure to be back before this time tomorrow.”

  He and two of his best friends from Dayton—a tiny community in eastern Washington Territory—swam their horses over to the west bank of the Salmon, then started north into the broken country. They hadn’t been moving more than two hours when they were rewarded with sighting a half-dozen figures on foot in the distance.

  “Enfant de garce!” one of the six men sobbed as they lunged up among the trio of horsemen.

  “Shit, any of you Americans?” Hunter asked, perplexed. “Speak English?”

  “A little some,” confessed another of the bedraggled half-dozen.

  “You look a sight, fellas,” Hunter said. “Where’s your horses? Your guns?”

  The good-talker shook his head as if searching for the right words, perhaps any words, to use in telling the story as Hunter and his companions dropped to the ground and let their horses blow. Slowly, painstakingly, the story unfolded.

  When the outbreak first began, the six Frenchmen had been on this west side of the Salmon, farther to the south. In fact, they claimed they had yelled a warning across the river to some American friends. Once hundreds of the Nez Perce showed up near the mouth of the White Bird, the Frenchmen fled deep into the hills on the other side of the Salmon. But not so far they hadn’t heard all the gunfire the day of the battle.

  Keeping to their side of the river, they had trained a keen eye on the migrations of the Non-Treaty bands as the Indians moved south to Horseshoe Bend, then crossed and started back north to where Larry Ott had been homesteading on Deer Creek then started to climb into the formidable terrain. Three days ago they had run across a trio of Chinese miners who warned them that war parties were prowling the countryside, horsemen who had allowed the Chinese to pass unharmed.